Friday, 7 December 2012

Recently, though, I found myself hankering after a shop that
wasn't there. It happened when I visited the Victoria and Albert's
new furniture gallery, the most recent of their refurbishments.
It's rather good – full of instructive displays about
furn...

And as the arts have more, many more, awards than there are
weeks in the year, who could begrudge a major one for contemporary
art? And yet I do have problems with it. A small problem is the age
limit for entrants, which is frankly nuts. What sort of...

But now Washington is playing the same gas-chanty all over again. Bashar has chemical weapons. He may use them against his own people. And if he does…Well if he does, Obama and Madame Clinton and Nato will be very, very angry. But over the past week,...

"It seemed weird that it had no return address," the 76-year-old fondly remembers. The mystery was solved a few weeks later when a friend of hers met O'Neal at a party, and reported him "talking about this tarantula in a tennis-ball can. He says he ...

Michael Gething, 42, perished in an alleyway, apparently from hypothermia. Totnes has no homeless shelter and, although Mr Gething had been offered accommodation 13 miles away in Dartmouth, he preferred to stay where he was. But the recent cold wea...

Your article on net government borrowing (22 November) threw light on this argument. The statistics showed that average borrowing over the 18 years of Conservative governments (1979-1996) was £29.5bn a year. However, between 1997 and 2007 the last La...

Those positives include a transformed city, a distinctive new spirit and much-improved political relations in an evidently stable settlement. Unionist Peter Robinson and republican Martin McGuinness both paid warm tribute to Hillary Clinton yesterday...

First, there is a principle at stake. The British Exchequer is no charity, and payments to it are not to be decided at the whim of the corporation. That the head of Starbucks in the UK, Kris Engskov, has said that the company will consider extending ...

With private Caribbean islands so passé, however, and the global super-rich always on the lookout for new levels of exclusivity, it is hard to believe that a trip to the Sea of Tranquillity will not prove tempting to private clients.After all, Richar...

He went on: “So there are a group of Jews out there, with extreme beliefs, that think the Old Testament is all fact – which means Israel belongs to the Jews and the Palestinians must give all of the land back to them, as this book is, of course, the ...

So I admit that I approached the Autumn Statement with some trepidation. A whole hour of that snarl. I expected quantities of patronising condescension and rebarbative attacks on Labour’s record. But blow me down with David Cameron’s airbrush, for at...

Normally, when a parent dies, children feel at first like orphans. Suddenly, they’re in the front line. When the signal comes for “over the top!”, they’re the ones who’ve got to charge. Not only that, but after feeling bereft initially, they often st...

It is an idea, as it applies to the former at least, that has been out of favour somewhat in Britain, ever since the Prince of Wales was tasteless enough to compare the efforts of Britain’s architects to remodel contemporary London to those of the Lu...

One state school applicant wrote that they had been on a school trip to Cadbury World and had been given the opportunity of organising the school lockers in their GCSE year. Another said that he often watched Match of the Day. By contrast, one privat...

We are dealing here with three nouns. Two of the three are pronounced the same; two are spelt the same, but not the same two.Dessert (pronounced with the stress on the second syllable): the last course of a meal. Desert (pronounced the same as the ab...

It’s not the first time. The film’s director, Tom Hooper,
revealed that at the first screening in New York, a fortnight ago,
guests clapped “14 to 15 times”. And not only clapped. “For a
minute, I freaked out, wondering, what’s that odd sound on the
...

In a climate of economic tension, the most vulnerable require more care. In the long run, they will end up costing more as their unmet needs will generate crises. My understanding is that the entire value of cuts in children’s social care is equivale...

We are temperamentally suspicious, in this column, of absolutes. “Democracy”, “liberty”, “human rights”, “freedom of expression” – invoke any one of these in the appropriate company and it’s tantamount to uttering the holy name of God. Except that Go...

Ghana’s 2012 election will be the country’s sixth presidential election since it democratised in 1992. So far it has passed the famous ‘two turnover test’ for established democracies, with peaceful transitions of power occurring in 2001 and 2009. In ...

Rap, of course, isn’t the only art form that gets loud and gestural from time to time – after all, Luciano Pavarotti was pretty good at belting the tunes out – but I felt that Mr. Guthrie had short-changed the genre, to put it mildly. Saying that ra...

The anti-wind farm windbag Donald Trump initiated his own game of Twitter Top Trumps last night when he engaged in a battle of…er…wits with Lord Alan Sugar, his opposite number on reality show The Apprentice. The spat started when Sugar expressed his...

1. Jeffrey Archer and Ted FrancisIn 1999 he brokered the deal exposing the allegedly false alibi concocted by Jeffrey Archer and Ted Francis which led to both being tried for dishonesty. It has been reported that Clifford says he was paid a commissio...

The comedian and recently-convicted domestic
abuser is a worm, dipped in the tabloid pond to draw attention to a forthcoming
series. Perhaps Endemol and Channel 5 have no intention of following the
proposal through, or no expectation that Collins wil...

The video shows pictures of people's faces before and after they
became hooked on the highly addictive drug, allowing addicts and
potential users to see the immense physical impact.
Facial changes are clear to see just months after first taking
the ...

In an open letter shared on Facebook, Engskov – formerly an aide to Bill Clinton - trumpeted that Starbucks will pay an additional £20 million in tax to HMRC over the next two years. That's “above the rate required by law” - a gesture prompted by "ou...

The murder happened during the course of an escape attempt when Allgier wrestled a gun from the guard, Stephen Anderson and escaped the University of Utah medical clinic, where he had been brought for an MRI scan. As The Huffington Post reports, he w...

Burnham and Maude were a great pairing...I was a bit nonplussed when I heard that Francis Maude was going to be on as he's one of those figures who, despite being around forever, just seems to flit in and out of the picture, never staying still long ...

A boy? A girl? (A pretty safe bet it'll be one or the other). More popular than Prince Charles? (Probably). A brunette? (6/4). A ginger?While the Duke of Cambridge and the wholeheartedly brunette Duchess might blanch at the thought of a little ginger...

On the one hand that is quite understandable, since,
as emotions go, it is generally not one of the agreeable ones. Jealousy
can sweep through your life like a hurricane, destroying relationships and
careers – just ask General Petraeus.
But is jealou...